1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and a distributed printing method for dividing a print job and printing print data at a plurality of printers, and a storage medium storing a program realizing such a method.
2. Related Background Art
A print process by application software is executed by a print function provided by a general OS installed in an information processing apparatus. However, this print process by application software to be executed by a print function provided by a general OS installed in an information processing apparatus, is associated with the following problems if used by a plurality of printers.
For example, a plurality of printer objects are formed in a printer manager of an OS, e.g., Windows (product name) of Microsoft Corporation. If a plurality of printers are used to perform print processes through application software, a user is required to enter a print command for each of the printers.
Application software cannot spool print data as the data for a plurality of printers.
If printers are of the same type (having the same PDL and the same printable area), a plurality of job control portions of a PDL generated by the common printer driver are formed to perform distributed printing by supplying PDL to distributed pages. This approach cannot be applied to the distributed printing by using printers of different types. If the same spool and print process are to be used for the distributed printing by a plurality of printers of different types, only the function shared by all printers can be used, and a function characteristic to each printer cannot be used.
For the distributed printing by a plurality of printers, a user cannot be notified of information what pages are printed on which printer.
During the distributed printing, upon copies of a distributed printing job at one printer, copies of another job may be placed. Even if a distributed printing printer becomes abnormal such as no-paper and another printer is automatically used to continue the printing, this changed output destination is not notified to a user. It becomes difficult for the user to collect output copies.
A method of notifying a completion of the distributed printing is not known. If an output of the next job is executed, copies of the current job and next job are mixed. A user is required to sort the copies with a large work load after the completion of the print jobs. These problems associated with the conventional techniques have long been desired to be solved.